It’s
possible that Avinash didn’t have time to examine every angle—especially since
he was putting presentation slides together for London at the time, and we all
know how that goes—so I’d like to address the more dangerous and misleading
conclusions that can be drawn from so-called “Real™ Conversion Rate” thinking.

The article
first caught my eye when it described, among other things, how to "…improve
your Conversion Rate in 10 minutes by doing nothing more than applying simple
math." Sounds fantastic! After all,
here we are as an industry spending tens of millions of dollars
measuring marketing efforts that cost tens of billions of dollars when,
all the while, a solution needing less time than a cup of coffee sits
under our collective noses. “This will be great,” I thought.

The problem
with the argument presented in the article is that it strikes me as a
marketer's version of the Anthropic Principle:
the notion that the universe is the way it is because we're in it. Such
scientists are that the forces of Nature are balanced just-so because every
other variation would not allow Life (i.e., us) to exist to observe it.

Applied to
marketing and analytics the message becomes: "We're professionals who toil
to effectively persuade. All those industry-typical, outrageously-low
conversion rates can't be our fault because we work too hard, so there
must be something wrong with the math." In other words, let's fit the data
to our expectations, rather than the other way around.

This
fascinating approach to improving conversion consists not of converting
more traffic, but filtering out what qualifies as “total traffic.” I
like to call this our “Unreal™ Conversion Rate.” It's kind of like deciding
the crime rate is too high, and therefore the solution is to make murder
legal -- thus lowering the crime rate by simply not counting an
entire class of crime. Of course, our government does this every day
in under-reporting the budget deficit when it uses current Social Security
receipts to offset current year expenses, despite the fact that those
receipts represent future debt still to be repaid. Ah, but I
digress.

The same logic was
applied to women’s dress sizes in the U.S. when the Department of Commerce
withdrew the standardization of woman’s apparel in January, 1983. It’s no secret that American women—and men,
and children—have gotten heavier since then. So, in a blatant appeal to vanity, a “perfect Size 6” became a “Size 4”
or lower! Today, there are even negative sizes for our svelte ladies. One might otherwise conclude that the thin
have gotten thinner. Yet, sadly,
thinking thin doesn’t quite do the trick.

The article
then states something spot-on: "The fastest way for you to improve
your conversion rate is to figure out what is the number of people who are in
play for even remotely being converted.”

Yes, I
totally agree. But then the piece goes on to describe three suggestions for
achieving such improvement and, in so doing, demonstrates
the H.L. Mencken witticism that "For every complex problem there is a
solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."

#1 Bounce Rate

An
interesting approach on bounce rate, defined in the article as "…the
minimum time that someone has to commit to your website, just ten seconds,
for you to even have a chance of convincing that visitor of anything." At
first, this sounds reasonable, at least until you start
thinking a bit deeper of some actual scenarios in which it would be
in play. The first time someone comes to your site, it may absolutely be true
that they do a 10-second-ish scan of your homepage. But what about regular,
repeat customers, the backbone of any successful business?

When you go
to Amazon.com to buy a book, do you stare at the site for 10 seconds,
waiting to be convinced? Or, already familiar with Amazon's fairly standard
navigation, do you instead quickly type in the book/DVD/gadget you were
actually looking for? In fact, wouldn't a repeat customer spending more
than 10 seconds at a familiar interface indicate something were wrong rather than right?

And wouldn't
this suggest several other insights? For instance, there are certain situations
where the bounce rate is an indication of something wrong in the selling
process rather than customer disinterest. Further, that there are some situations where the mental state of the
prospect indicates they know precisely what they want, rather than just idling around.

These two
points combined suggest that there are any number of scenarios and states of
mind of the personas visiting the site—all of which must be accounted for in
fulfilling a full spectrum of customer needs and goals. It seems
unreasonable that we can infer intent based on bounce rate. (Actually, I'd assert that we can't infer
intent by any analytic-centric approach; we can only use analytics to measure
the efficacy of modeled intentional paths. But that's a different discussion
altogether).

So, this
huge discount of10-20-30% of traffic caused by "bounce
rate" is really just a fudge factor so we don't have to feel as bad for
not really planning out complex sets of scenarios.

To be
frank, this advice has been around 1999. The article claimed that a conversion
"realization dawned" thereby shedding some insight. If you're
still mining your own web logs and don't know to filter image requests, or
still using software that doesn't filter it automatically, then you don't need
a filter, you need a good hard kick in the ass. Maybe it's time to splurge on indoor
plumbing, or a color TV.

Then again,
if you're still doing all that AND having industry-standard conversion
rates of about 2.5%, then what does that really say about the analytics
industry in 2007?

#3 “Use Customer Intent”

This point
starts out so well; so delightfully, painfully well: "One of the biggest
mistakes business[es] make is thinking that every visitor to the website is
fair game.” I just knew the next
statement would be something insightful, such as "not every visitor is
there for the same reason,” or "visitors might be motivated to achieve
different things on your site" or something along those lines.

Instead, we
are treated to a stereotyped car dealership analogy that belies a fundamental
misunderstanding of the sales process. What's next, ‘All Democrats are Commie
Pinkos?’ or, ‘The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice?” You can read the
example yourself in the article, but the gist is that the big evil car salesman
is going to do every unethical thing in his stereotyped book to trick you into
buying a car. And you, the noble
visitor, have loftier goals that none dare call conversion.

So close to
making some headway, the article continues: "not every visitor ... is
there to buy" (true! true!), followed by the disappointing "not
every visit ... is an opportunity to convert" (false! false!). In
fact, your visitors are there precisely to convert as long as you realize that
in order for your business to achieve its goals, the customer must be allowed
to achieve her goals first.

Funny thing
is, even if marketers and site owners don't get this, most salespeople do—which
is exactly why they modify how they sell to match the customer buying process.
There are countless ethical, insightful and financially successful car salesmen
who know how to sell to folks who just happen to walk into the car dealership
looking only for information. Their hush-hush
trade secret: they give them only information. They establish rapport and build
a relationship by giving the customer what she wants at her particular point in
the buying cycle. And by doing so, they
create the state of mind in the customer to come back later in the buying cycle
when she is truly ready to purchase.

I think
that the fundamental misunderstanding of the article is best summed up in the
following paragraph where it states "Using Market Research or Website
Surveys or other methods, attempt to compute why Visitors come to your
website.”

Wait,
you're gonna COMPUTE why Visitors come to your website? If you don't already know
why people come to your website, what will "computing" it do for you?
I can compute the path of the earth around the sun, but does that tell me why
gravity works the way it does? I think not.

And what
self-respecting business owner needs Market Research or Surveys to determine
why people come to the site? To be sure those things can give insight
into why people don't come to the site, or why they come to the site and then
leave too quickly (after all, that's the proposed benefit to using Bounce
Ratio). But if you're in business and
you don't know why people come to your site, then you're in a heap of trouble,
and a survey ain’t gonna save you.

There's no
amount of analytics crunching that is going to tell you why people come to your
site. Rather, one must do the hard work
of putting oneself in the visitor’s place and empathically plan the persuasive
scenarios in which they come to the site. Then, aggressively use analytics to measure how well you've implemented
those scenarios; THAT's the secret to significantly higher conversion. Otherwise, we’re merely forcing the numbers
to rationalize our own poor planning.

Speaking of conversion rates, and I'm not sure if you'll be able to speak to my question, but I received an email saying that Grokdotcom was about to delete from their mailing list anyone who doesn't respond to their last newsletter.

Is this correct or did I misread it?

If so, I can see how this might increase your conversion rate (by culling the herd, so to speak), but at what cost?

I'm very interested in the results of this experiment, since it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. (Imagine, tossing out your mailing list! The horror!)

Geez I hope that Grok piece is not true...I certainly did not see that and I would hate to think I get axed because of it... sometimes I'm too busy to read every newsletter...it does not mean I don't want them to keep coming, it just means sometimes I am too busy to read them...

"no amount of analytics crunching that is going to tell you why people come to your site."

Right on the money! But it seems too many analyst's money is tied up in fancy smoke and mirrors 'numbers' to admit that they are really just shotgunning the market with a pseudo-science weapon - namely a 'user experience/marketing' survey.

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